The Stack Exchange user interface now prevents creating tags that differ only in hyphenation or pluralization. This hasn't always been so, however, and there are currently many such tag pairs, like log-files and logfiles, or author and authors, or mobiledevice and mobile-devices.

Let's clean up!

Clean up means, for each such tag pair:

First decide whether the tags really mean the same thing. There are false positives in this list. windows and window have nothing to do with each other. Most of the hits are good, though.

If the tag names really mean the same thing, decide which name to keep. There are several general principles:

There is no consensus for plural vs. singular for nouns. This old thread very weakly suggest the singular, and among popular pairs the singular is dominant, but recent practice tends towards plural.

If it has been decided that a tag T2 should be merged into a tag T1, then:

If there are a lot of occurrences of T2, suggest or vote for a tag synonym, which will eventually lead to the tags being merged.

If there are only a handful of occurrences of T1, then we can get rid of T1 manually.

Please observe some ground rules:

Do not retag if you aren't sure that you're doing the right thing. If you aren't sure whether two tags mean the same thing or which name to keep, ask on Meta and try to get people competent in the subject matter involved. If you aren't sure which community(/ies) uses a tag, check the “Related tags” box in the right-hand column.

If you find a tag that looks ambiguous, or a useless tag that should be removed, or a tag that indicates off-topic posts, take appropriate action. Ask on Meta or get advice in chat if you aren't sure what to do.

If you retag some posts manually, don't just change that one tag: take the time to do any other warranted improvement (other tags, spelling, formatting, etc.). If you see a question that should be closed, vote or flag it.

If you know what a tag is about, and it doesn't have a tag wiki yet, write a tag wiki. This is especially important when you see a pair of similar tags that are not synonyms: inform the world of what the tags mean.

I've listed all the tag pairs that are concerned by this clean-up in two answers below (postprocessed from this Data Explorer query):

This question came from our discussion, support, and feature requests site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A websites.

Has this process failed to take effect? Many of the singular/plural tag combinations still exist. Plus the tag voting and synonym suggestion system isn't helping a concerted effort to clean up because many tags I'm not allowed to vote on or suggest synonyms despite it being absolutely clear that they mean the same things (ie sprite vs sprites).
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LearnCocos2DNov 1 '14 at 10:30

@LearnCocos2D What process are you talking about? There's a process that prevents new pairs from arising. This thread is about cleaning up the old pairs.
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GillesNov 1 '14 at 15:42

That's what I'm saying, the old pairs are still here, the thread is 2.5 years old by now. I can't say when sprite vs sprites have been added, but I'm sure they've been around for a while yet I've only recently suggested sprites being a synonym for sprite. Maybe I've been looking at the wrong pairs though, maybe I have the wrong idea about a concerted effort to "clean up" (ie completed within a few months).
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LearnCocos2DNov 1 '14 at 15:59

4 Answers
4

I think the other thing to consider is whether or not one of the tags has a wiki associated with it. For example, post has a wiki; posts does not. Thus, it would make more sense to roll the non-wikified tag into the already established and wiki'd tag.

Also, using this specific example, post and http-post are actually synonyms of each other (based on the tag wiki), whereas posts means something completely different and is possibly full of off-topic questions.

Both of those tags have different meanings per their tag wikis. I'm trying to think of the best solution there, as there is likely some overlap there. They definitely cannot stay as-is though.
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animuson♦Nov 14 '13 at 1:34

@animuson Oh damn, I hadn't read that. Damn. They're pretty much all over the place, I bet.
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MPelletierNov 14 '13 at 5:14

1

@animuson Just throwing this out there: Ban both. maps as in cartography is substituted for that, cartography. map as in the data structure is substituted with mapping. It's not perfect, I admit.
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MPelletierNov 14 '13 at 5:19

1

I'd excluded tag pairs where the singular was 3 characters or fewer because there were too many false positives that were TLA/FLA pairs, so signaling 3-letter words is good. However, I think map and maps should stay as tags, though I agree that maps could be synonymed to cartography (but I don't like map → mapping: it's not the same concept at all).
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GillesNov 14 '13 at 7:48

@animuson Is there a lot of misuse? If the tags are used correctly, they can stay.
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GillesNov 14 '13 at 7:49

@Gilles Then perhaps just synonymizing maps to cartography should at least fix half the problem.
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MPelletierNov 14 '13 at 13:31

@Gilles Ultimately,I think maps should just be burninated. It's broad and encompasses a lot of different things. Right off the bat I see Nokia Maps and Google Maps, which are probably not even close to the same thing, but are both being used as their respective tags (nokia-maps and google-maps) plus the maps tag. With that done, though, the map tag would need to be renamed to something more descriptive to prevent further abuse. I also see Bing Maps in there, and who knows how many other improper uses.
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animuson♦Nov 14 '13 at 17:39

@Gilles map-structure for clarity? But I'm afraid 99% of newbies will tag them all anyways...
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MPelletierNov 14 '13 at 19:30

@Adinia When you clean up a pair, please remove it from the answer, so that others can look at the list and pick another pair to clean up.
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GillesOct 1 '12 at 11:30

Can any of this retagging be done dynamically on the DB level? Like find all tagA and replace it with tagB. Or/and can these lists be dynamic or at least refreshed every now and then? (unless they already are)
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GeoDec 28 '12 at 20:39

@Geo Moderators have a tool to merge tags. But before tags can be made, community members must review the potential synonyms to ensure that they are indeed synonyms (we wouldn't want to merge window and windows!). The list was extracted from the database, it won't grow anymore since it has become impossible to create new such tag pairs (e.g. foo-bar or foobars can't be created when foobar exists).
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GillesDec 28 '12 at 20:44

What do we do in case when there are 182 instances of harddrive and only 7 hard-drive, and the tag of choice is the latter and less popular one? Fix 182 posts? Or just go with the more popular one? Perhaps once all the duplicates are resolved, there would be a way to change the tag to its better version?
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GeoDec 28 '12 at 21:29

@Geo: You can ask on meta for it to be merged. Merging is easy for moderators.
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ManishearthDec 28 '12 at 21:34

@Manishearth and how do I do that? Just create a meta question?
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GeoDec 28 '12 at 21:36

Would these be considered duplicates html-heading/html-head, link-tag/stylesheet-link-tag, canonicalization/canonical-link? Also there is another one - canonical. It's different. Though it might be confused with the aforementioned two canonical
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GeoJan 25 '13 at 21:30

1

@Geo I don't know. You should ask these in separate questions (one question per tag pair or per group of closely related tags).
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GillesJan 25 '13 at 21:52

Edited to say I'd got rid of all popup inconsistencies, then saw I was looking at the wrong tabs on the tags, and there are actually loads more. So rolled back. Lovely.
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TRiGFeb 8 '14 at 20:54